1. Technical Field
This invention is directed toward a system and method for conducting a distributed meeting. More specifically, the invention is directed toward a system and method for two-way audio/video/data conferencing that includes a recording capability, as well as enhanced browsing of an archived meeting.
2. Background Art
Meetings are an important part of everyday life for many workgroups. Often, due to scheduling conflicts or travel constraints, people cannot attend all of their scheduled meetings. In addition, people are often only peripherally interested in a meeting such that they want to know what happened during the meeting without actually attending. Being able to browse and skim a recorded meeting in these cases could be quite valuable.
Today, a variety of live teleconferencing systems are available commercially. A considerable overlap exists between the domain of recording meetings and watching them afterward and the domain of live teleconferencing. For example, both recorded meetings and live video conferences require audio-visual capturing equipment, and both can use sound source localization (SSL) to track the person who is speaking. For instance, if a Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) camera is used to capture video data of a person speaking, the system can direct the camera to focus on the correct person. If an omni-directional camera is used to capture the video data, the system can cut directly to that person by using sound source localization (SSL). Commercial video teleconferencing (VTC) systems available today use only audio-based SSL to locate the speaker. While this approach works most of the time, it has two limitations. First, its spatial resolution is not high enough. Second, it may lose track and point to the wrong direction due to room noise, reverberation, or multiple people talking at the same time.
Besides video conferencing systems, there also exist web-based conferencing systems. However, the meeting playback capabilities are extremely limited or non-existent for these web-based conferencing system.
In addition to video conferencing, there has also been recent interest in automatic meeting recording systems, e.g., from FX PAL, Georgia Tech, and PolyCom's StreamStation. However, they are limited in their use of advanced technologies. For example, the former two systems mentioned mainly focus on recording slides, notes and annotations. In addition, they focus more on the User Interface (UI) of their systems instead of the technology necessary to enhance meeting recording and playback. They use relatively primitive methods to identify who is talking in the meeting. Sophisticated indexing to allow a user to easily review the highlights of the meeting is also lacking. The integration of a variety of data capture devices is also limited and no sophisticated meeting analysis tools are available.
It is noted that in the remainder of this specification, the description refers to various individual publications identified by a numeric designator contained within a pair of brackets. For example, such a reference may be identified by reciting, “reference [1]” or simply “[1]”. A listing of the publications corresponding to each designator can be found at the end of the Detailed Description section.